PremiumWhen Marco star Unni Mukundan battled the action-hero image: ‘I've been fighting this all my career...’
Unni Mukundan’s latest hit Marco, which is on track to become one of his biggest hits, has firmly established him as an action hero, but there was a time when the actor was fighting that image.
Last Updated: 06.01 PM, Dec 30, 2024
From very early on in his career, Malayalam star Unni Mukundan was bracketed as an action hero, an image he has fully embraced for his latest blockbuster Marco. However, this wasn’t the case for a long time, with the actor himself admitting to OTTplay in one of his previous interviews a few years ago, that he had fought against this unwelcome image.
As Marco fast approaches Rs 75 crore at the worldwide box office and Unni firmly establishes himself as an action hero, whose films from the genre, are being looked forward to – not just by Malayalam audiences, but across India, there’s no better time than now to recall when the Malikkappuram actor was “fighting to get over the image”.
Unni Mukundan: All my career, I have been fighting this battle
In an interview in 2021, ahead of the release of Meppadiyan, the actor told us that post his first hit as the lead hero, Mallu Singh, there was already an image of him as an action hero. “And this came with its set of expectations,” said the Jai Ganesh actor. “All my career, have been fighting this battle. I never ask for action roles, but when I get them, I do them really well.”
The actor also explained how this posed a challenge for what he wanted to do as an actor – pick a variety of roles. “There was a talk that I wanted to do only action roles and people seemed to think that even the public was demanding that,” he said. Even when films such as M Padmakumar’s romantic drama Orissa and Ithu Pathiramanal were critically acclaimed, it didn’t help the actor’s cause as they weren’t box office hits.
That’s when Unni was offered the role as a well-built, IPS officer-aspirant in Dulquer Salmaan’s Vikramadithyan. The Marco actor had previously said that he was against taking up the role as he didn’t want to be stereotyped, but it was the film’s director Lal Jose who convinced him to believe that “it was my strength and use it to my advantage”.
Unni Mukundan embraces the action-hero image in Marco
The Malayalam actor is the perfect example of totally using the people’s perception of him and acing it, with Marco now being a pan-Indian hit. The brutal action-thriller's Hindi version is also raking in money at the box office, even replacing the Bollywood film Baby John in theatres.
In a recent press meet in Mumbai, Unni said that he had grown up watching action films and some of his favorite actors are action heroes. But he also went on to say, “In our industry, we have Mohanlal who has set a high benchmark. So, when you want to become like him and do even a small part of what he has done, people appreciate you.”
For all you know, Unni might have been talking about the diverse characters that Mohanlal has played, and the success of Marco could open similar doors for him, in genres he wasn’t considered prior to his big action blockbuster.